085 - The Time Between Worlds with Layman Pascal

Portals of Perception

How do we reckon with a reckoning? We can look around at the many crises engulfing the planet and think that, yes, humanity is facing its day of reckoning, a time of consequences for many forms of unsustainable behavior throughout the modern era. The “twilight of the gods,” or unraveling of our inherited values and reality described in mythology and literature.

Can we find a path forward from reckoning to renewal? In a post-guru era, the search for new intelligence and insight doesn’t rely on any single external authority. We are inspired by gifted teachers, shamans, and enlightened companions, but this also is a time of distributed leadership.

Each one of us has the natural capacity to connect with a universal source of knowledge and creativity — homo universalis. Each one of us carries a piece of the puzzle that together form a clear image of a collective new future. Doesn’t it make sense to then together reckon new ways of creating community that liberate the best each has to offer?

We are fortunate to again have a gifted guide as we navigate our way through this shape-shifting new reality. This is the third conversation between Aviv Shahar and Layman Pascal, a leader in Integral thinking and teaching, and a prominent voice on the Integral Stage YouTube channel and podcast.

Among their insights:

• We’re entrenched on this planet in patterns that are not accessing the spirit. We're not collectively mobilizing to solve the metacrisis. We need a new source of meaning and energy to mobilize outside our embedded patterns.
• Merging and harmonizing different realms of experience produces an “extra,” greater than the sum of the parts. The extra is a pragmatic way to think about what spirituality and religion point toward.
• We have to reckon with the fact the very instruments through which we are trying to solve our problems are generating another set of problems that are gaining on us very quickly.
• We can't trust anything socially; we’re peripherally aware that we're not experiencing the same reality; the structure has been removed — a deeply uncanny and unsettling place to be; the time between worlds.
• Our sense of a shared consensus reality has been undermined. Any voice, image, or reference material can be generated by machine tools; what could give us the sense of proof has been taken away from us.
• We need to practice the emotional quality of trust individually, collectively and as a culture. There are many objective reasons to not trust our embedded systems, but we have a personal responsibility to be capable of trust.

This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

TWEETABLE QUOTES

“So I think the emotional quality of trust is something that we need to practice more individually, collectively, and as a culture. When we look at the broader sociopolitical situation in the world there are many objective reasons to not trust the systems that we are embedded in. But we also have a personal responsibility to become capable of trust, because it's not just a response to what's out there, it's also kind of a faithful act that we make in ourselves.” (Layman)

“We're just shifting to a new system, so that we have to develop new responses collectively for figuring out how to be together, how to be in reality. And, in order to do that, we have to be able to sample lots of different kinds of perspectives and different kinds of reality tunnels. But not only sample them and acknowledge the plurality, not only go into the post-modern kind of consciousness, we have to be able to bring them back together in a way that is coherent and empowering. So that's the shift beyond the post-modern into the meta-modern sensibility.” (Layman)

“There is a body of work that’s been emerging over the last few years inside the Portals project, which we call the epoch transition, or the epoch journey, where we tell the story of the epoch through sevenfold natures, or through the rainbow. But these colors mean something other than what they mean in the traditional integrative framework, or spiral dynamics, or any other they’re talking about. They are describing recurring potencies in nature that are emergent throughout the epoch.” (Aviv)

RESOURCES MENTIONED

Portals of Perception Website

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Aviv’s Website

The Time Between Worlds with Layman Pascal